Hard out there for a hegemon

Vladimir Lukich Borovikovsky, potrait of Anna and Varvara Gagarin, 1802.

Shorter Ross Douthat, "The Method to Obama's Middle East Mess", March 29 2015:

Guess what, Bush was wrong. Cheney was right. If you keep trying to stop killing people, somebody could get hurt. The only way to ensure world peace is perpetual war.

The Bush would be the George W. Bush of ca. 2006, who suddenly realized that allowing Cheney and Rumsfeld to run the government was making him unpopular and staged a bit of a palace coup, with the help of George H.W. Bush's CIA director Robert Gates and, no doubt, other veterans of the brief reign of George I, and the Monsignor is stepping out to take a position against the coup and for the not-so-ancien régime.

No, he doesn't say that. Indeed, he doesn't mention Bush or Cheney at all. But after a good deal of work, much too tedious to report, trying to figure out what he is talking about in this piece, I've decided that's all he can mean, with a column devoted to attacking the concept of "offshore balancing", something that has only been mentioned, as far as I can determine, three times in the history of the New York Times (each time by Ross Douthat, starting last July), as if it were at the center of an ongoing controversy.

Offshore balancing is, as it turns out, a phrase coined in 1997 by one Christopher Layne, now the University Distinguished Professor, Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security, and professor of international affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, you see what I'm saying here, and suspected of being the secret author of his own Wikipedia biography. The phrase is meant to summarize a kind of conservative-realist posture in the Grand Strategy discourse, in opposition to the messianic unipolarism of the Cheneyite neoconservatives, but it's been adopted by nonconservatives such as Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer for a more general concept, as described by Francis Fukuyama and old general Karl Eikenberry in a Financial Times piece (whoa!) of last September, on the issue of Iraq and Syria:

Mr Obama could learn from England’s policy – and later Britain’s – towards the European continent over the centuries. London had no permanent friends. But whenever a single power looked set to dominate Europe, the country would throw its weight behind an opposing coalition, a strategy known as “offshore balancing”. Britain was never a land power but its navy and economic might turned [sic] the balance against would-be hegemons....

Aiming merely to contain a long and awful civil war, instead of settling it once and for all, is unappealing, not to say cynical. But it is hubris to think the US can even comprehend the root causes of this ethnic-sectarian war. When it tried using hard power in Iraq, the consequences proved worse than the original problem. Yet it can scarcely retreat from a world that is slipping out of control. Offshore balancing is a sustainable posture. What it promises, it can deliver.

Urging Obama to adopt an offshore balancing approach goes back to Mearsheimer, who was doing it before the inauguration, in December 2008:

George W. Bush hoped he could implant democracy in the Middle East by using the U.S. military to topple the unfriendly regime in Baghdad—and maybe those in Damascus and Tehran, too—and replace them with friendly, democratic governments.

Things didn't work out well, of course, and it's now vital that the new president devise a radically different strategy for dealing with this critical part of the world. Fortunately, one approach has proved effective in the past and could serve America again today: "offshore balancing." During the cold war, this strategy enabled Washington to contain Iran and Iraq and deter direct Soviet intervention in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. As a Middle East policy, offshore balancing may be less ambitious than Bush's grand design was—no one promises it will lead to an "Arab spring"—but it will be much more effective at protecting actual U.S. interests.

Funny about how abandoned that "Arab Spring" idea looked in 2008, huh? But I think it's now evident that Bush and Gates had been working toward an offshore balancing position for two years at that point, in their own half-assed way, complicated by the impossibility of admitting that Bush had done anything wrong in the past, and that Obama has been working that way as well, only in a much more informed and sophisticated style, with advice from Walt and Mearsheimer, which has only fully declared itself more recently (for some Washington reason Obama had to hire an incompetent Defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, before he was entirely able to take over the process).

This has been noted with various degrees of interest by various figures, including a pleased Peter Beinart (in 2011), a very distressed Thomas Donnelly (in 2012) a somewhat positive Layne himself (in 2012), a rather negative Peter Feaver in Foreign Policy (in June 2013), and a remarkable flurry of Zachary Keck responding to Jim Holmes flagging Lee Smith complaining about Stephen Walt in The Diplomat (February 2014) explaining that it's just common sense, like Israel arming Iran in the decade of the Iran-Iraq war (oops!). Which is, in fact, what the Monsignor's taking issue with, though I think his idea of what offshore balancing consists of is pretty slenderly sourced (from an article by Daniel McCarthy in The American Conservative, July 2014, which is where that original Douthat column took its breath from in the first place), and he pictures it as basically a retreat:

Haltingly but persistently, this administration has pursued a paradigm shift in how the United States relates to the Middle East, a shift from a Pax Americana model toward a strategy its supporters call “offshore balancing.”

In a Pax Americana system, the United States enjoys a dominant position within a network of allies and clients; actors outside that network are considered rogues and threats, to be restrained and coerced by our overwhelming military might. Ideally, over time our clients become more prosperous and more democratic, the benefits of joining the network become obvious, and the military canopy both expands and becomes less necessary.

In an offshore balancing system, our clients are fewer, and our commitments are reduced. Regional powers bear the primary responsibility for dealing with crises on the ground, our military strategy is oriented toward policing the sea lanes and the skies, and direct intervention is contemplated only when the balance of power is dramatically upset.

When it is rather the careful leveraging of power to get the most effect out of the least expenditure; and of course in my belief Obama's goal goes far beyond just that, from "realism" to liberalism, working with extreme delicacy toward the actual devolution of empire and the development of a truly multipolar world in which all the powers, from Japan and Australia to Turkey and Jordan, excercise real responsibility in their own rights and on their own accounts.

One of Douthat's complaints makes a lot of sense in the current situation, where the US assistance and counter-assistance to the various parties leads to an apparently chaotic situation that is too confusing for Jon Stewart, not to mention the lesser intellects of the Senate and the Washington press corps, to wrap their minds around:

it’s very hard for a hegemon to simply sidle offstage, shedding expectations and leaving allies in the lurch. And when you’re still effectively involved everywhere, trying to tip the balance of power this way and that with occasional airstrikes, it’s easy to end up in a contradictory, six-degrees-of-enmity scenario, with no clear goal in mind.

A totally clear-minded view on that which I would recommend to everybody including Jon Stewart is the one currently presented by Fred Kaplan in Slate (which I heard him discussing on WNYC this morning).

The other, far stupider complaint is the idea that the US just needs to exercise territorial hegemony on a Roman model, more powerful than the British Empire ever tried (or could ever afford) to be, because the alternative is simply too dangerous:

multipolar environments are often more unstable and violent, period, than unipolar ones. So offshoring American power and hoping that Iran, Iran’s Sunni neighbors and Israel will find some kind of balance on their own will probably increase the risk of arms races, cross-border invasions and full-scale regional war. 

Note that the article he links to for authority, William Wohlforth's celebrated claim for "The Stability of a Unipolar World", goes back to 1999. His whole argument is taken from a conversation held between 1997 and 2002, when young Ross himself was faking term papers at Harvard

Knowing nothing meant I could write anything. I didn't need to do any reading, absorb any history, or learn anything at all.

just before the invasion of Iraq made it irrelevant. You can't really speak that language any more, after the catastrophe of 2003.

Nowadays, Wohlforth himself, continuing to preach unipolarism, justifies it by saying that it's not all that expensive, that

the Iraq war was not an inevitable consequence of pursuing the United States' existing grand strategy; many scholars and policymakers who prefer an engaged America strongly opposed the war.

and that you could allow for the possibility of a good deal of that "offshore balancing" without ceasing to take a hegemonist view. He and his coauthors don't object to the broader aspects of Obama's posture at all:

Washington does not need to retain every commitment at all costs, and there is nothing wrong with rejiggering its strategy in response to new opportunities or setbacks. That is what the Nixon administration did by winding down the Vietnam War and increasing the United States' reliance on regional partners to contain Soviet power, and it is what the Obama administration has been doing after the Iraq war by pivoting to Asia. These episodes of rebalancing belie the argument that a powerful and internationally engaged America cannot tailor its policies to a changing world.

Maybe—but they show as well that the US cannot tailor the world to its policies, either, As for the Monsignor, he really isn't ready to sit at the grownups' table yet, not even on the wrong side.

Note: It's possible Douthat is playing a minor role in the wider conservative push to blow up the nuclear negotiations in Geneva between the P5 + 1 and Iran, now down to the excruciating wire, and that this whole stupid-windbag column is merely here as a frame for his spiteful little remark on how the administration is, together with all the European powers and the United Nations,

 delusional (as soon as we get the Iran deal, game changer, baby!).

That there is such a push seems certain, and Jim White at Emptywheel provides some evidence that somebody at the Times (remember David Sanger and Michael Gordon?) is involved. Or maybe I'm just antsy.